Bring Along the Weather

Suddenly, I've got a lot of Lenola in my life. It seems only yesterday that they dropped an ambitious ...

Suddenly, I've got a lot of Lenola in my life. It seems only yesterday that they dropped an ambitious,
double-disc album on me, and now Lenola vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Sean Byrne hits me with yet another
disc from his Twin Atlas side project. It's the duo's fifth album since 2000, if you include the as-yet
unreleased Inside the Skate Scandal. The other Twin is Lucas Zaleski, and with their powers combined,
the two make some pretty enjoyable music. Understandably, with Byrne handling lots of vocals here, it
comes off something like Lenola lite, which, as it turns out, is actually kind of a good thing.

See, Byrne's songwriting thrives when it's stripped of Lenola's busy psychedelic accompaniment and just
allowed to present itself to you. Lenola's swirl can be enthralling, but sometimes it distracts from the
melodies, and here, those melodies are laid out on top of laidback, sparse guitars, slow tempos, and
gently glowing keyboards. Perhaps even more than Lenola, The Twin Atlas evoke the fluorescent folk of
The Kinsgbury Manx, and the close harmonies smeared up and down this record drive the comparison home even
further.

The lilting acoustic strum and bold vocals of opener "Sun Touches Down" immediately set you down in a very
comfortable place, but things really pick up on the song that follows, the excellent "Show Me All". Drum
programming mixes with live drumming and subdued lead guitar, building to a fantastically layered chorus in
which lead and background vocals weave in a classic call-and-response. Speaking in terms of pure sonics,
though, The Twin Atlas have roughly the same problem as recent Lenola: homogeneity. The album's sonic character
is so consistent that things bleed together at times, particularly when you get a run of similarly paced
songs in the middle of the record. However, with the heavy production emphasis on melody, tracks like
"Beautiful Surprise" can't help but differentiate themselves from the pack.

Another part of what makes Bring Along the Weather work so well is its brevity-- at 39 minutes and
14 songs, it's shorter than any of the duo's previous releases (their debut, The Philadelphia Parking
Authority Must Die, had 26 songs on it), and the discretion shows in the consistent quality of the
material. Indeed, the band themselves remark that they implemented a stricter editing process while putting
this album together-- "y'know, make it more like a proper album, less like a bloated time-capsule," as they
put it on their website. That approach seems to have paid off nicely, as The Twin Atlas have slipped a
quietly ingratiating mickey to us with Bring Along the Weather, a fine companion piece to the
headier sounds of Lenola.